Theatre

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Rachel Kavanaugh's production of one of Shakespeare's least revived plays will genially wile away a summer's evening, but it never begins to uncover some of the darker currents beneath the surface of a comedy in which the betrayal of trust, love and friendship are central, and which also figures an attempted rape.

To be fair, it doesn't even try to be anything other than perfectly pleasant. With its early Italian urban setting, beautifully conjured by Paul Farnsworth's design of miniature houses on stilts, and a china doll Silvia tricked out like a Dresden shepherdess, this is a production that is easy on the eye and the brain. There's even a star turn from a dog for those who find the human actors hard to take.

For a youthful drama that requires a youthful cast who can play the comedy of love-sickness all in one gush, the casting and the pace is curiously middle-aged here, with Nick Fletcher's Proteus and Issy Van Randwyck's Silvia far too mature to convey the adolescent passion of the play. Too often what should be touchingly comic just seems a bit on the silly side. Phillipa Peak as the betrayed Julia - clearly an early prototype for Viola and perhaps even Rosalind - is the only one of quartet of lovers to have any depth of feeling as she turns from giddy to grave and sets out, disguised as a boy, in pursuit of her two-timing lover Valentine.

Shakespeare was still very much learning his craft on this play, and other ideas that would crop up more fully developed in later plays have their beginnings here. Valentine and Proteus's servants, Speed and Launce, are clearly an early run for the servant double act in The Comedy of Errors. As the cheeky Speed, a man with more wit and more brains than his master, John Hodgkinson turns in the best performance of the evening. There is a lightness of touch and signs of real comic edge and timing here that are lacking elsewhere in performances and a production that seems to err deliberately on the side of bland.